Clean and renewable energy

[HASEEB ANSARI]

Clean and renewable energy
Peter Hoffmann

Around the world, governments and businesses are constantly being called upon to make big investments in solar, wind, and geothermal energy, as well as biofuels. But, in the US, unlike in Europe and Asia, discussion of hydrogen energy and fuel cells as systemic, game-changing technologies is largely absent. That needs to change: these clean, renewable energy sources promise not only zero-emission base load power, but also a zero-emission fuel for cars and trucks, the biggest polluters of them all.

By now, many have heard about plans by big carmakers to launch hydrogen fuel-cell cars commercially around 2015. Daimler, Ford, and Nissan plan to launch such cars around 2017. Germany plans to build at least 50 hydrogen fuelling stations by 2015 as the start of a countrywide network. Japan and Korea have announced similar plans.
But a bigger, largely unreported, message is that some European countries, especially Germany, have launched projects that combine renewables like solar and wind with hydrogen for energy storage, implying clean, zero-emission, stable power grids that require no coal, oil, or nuclear power.
Indeed, the bottom line of a new study by two American researchers, Willett Kempton and Cory Budischak, is that the combination of renewables and hydrogen storage could fully power a large electricity grid by 2030 at costs comparable to those today. They designed a computer model for wind, solar and storage to meet demand for one-fifth of the US grid. The results buck “the conventional wisdom that renewable energy is too unreliable and expensive,” says Kempton. “For example,” according to Budischak, “using hydrogen for storage, we can run an electric system that today would meet a need of 72 GW, 99.9 percent of the time, using 17 GW of solar, 68 GW of offshore wind, and 115 GW of inland wind.”
Their study lends scientific support to several such projects underway in Europe aimed at proving that hydrogen gas, converted from water via electrolysis and stored, for example, in subterranean salt caverns, can smooth out fluctuations inherent in solar and wind energy. It builds in part on two recent studies at Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution, which conclude that “there is more than enough energy available in winds to power all of civilisation.”
The latest effort, scheduled to get underway outside Brussels this year, is the delightfully named “Don Quichote” project (“Demonstration of New Qualitative Innovative Concept of Hydrogen Out of wind Turbine Electricity”), designed to highlight utility-scale energy storage and transport, and to provide power for fuel-cell forklift trucks. Meanwhile, near Berlin, five companies launched a $13 million pilot project at the main airport in Schoenefeld in December, expanding and converting an existing hydrogen fuelling station to CO2 neutrality by linking it to a nearby wind farm. Earlier last year, two German utilities announced two gas demonstration plants. And the world’s first renewable energy or hydrogen hybrid power plant, producing both electricity and hydrogen as car fuel, started production in the fall of 2011.
The previous year, German Chancellor Angela Merkel laid the plant’s cornerstone herself, sending a strong signal of her seriousness about Germany’s shift to clean, renewable energy. Indeed, the much-noted Energiewende, or energy turnaround, that she announced in 2010 is arguably one of the most audacious acts of environmental statesmanship yet.
Germany’s move toward renewable energy is likely to have a much broader positive impact. More broadly, Lutz Mez, a political scientist at Berlin’s Free University, argues that the country’s shift has “observably decoupled energy supply from economic growth,” and that the “evolving Energiewende, rather than the nuclear phase-out” implies “continuing reforms of social, economic, technological, and cultural policy in Germany.” What, one wonders, are lagging nations waiting for?

The writer has authored “Tomorrow's Energy: Hydrogen, Fuel Cells, and the Prospects for a Cleaner Planet”, and is the editor of “The Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Letter” (www.hfcletter.com). This article has been reproduced from Project Syndicate.

http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-ne...newable-energy

[Roqayyah]

Renewable energy

Bonfire of the subsidies

Europe’s wood subsidies show the folly of focusing green policy on “renewables”

TO GO by the Domesday Book, the record of taxable lands produced for William the Conqueror in 1086, the manor of Drax, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, was not much of a place: six villagers, a priest and a value to its lord of a single pound. But it did have five leagues of woodland.

Today Drax is home to one of the most impressive pieces of engineering in Britain, a power station with a value to its owners of £2.5 billion. But it does not have much woodland. And, given the way Europe’s renewable-energy subsidies work, the appetites of that facility, and others around Europe, may mean that wood is in short supply in many places before long.
In 2009 the European Union set itself the target of getting 20% of its energy from renewable sources. For all the fields and roofs covered with solar panels and the once-empty uplands enlivened by wind turbines, by far the biggest power source in the plans is biomass: wood, crop residues and other burnable recently living stuff. The EU’s planners want to get 1,210 terawatt hours of energy from biomass in 2020, compared with 494TWh from wind. About 80% of that biomass energy would be used to heat things—wood-burning stoves and boilers are widely used in many European countries. But the 20% used to generate electricity would still equal all the energy expected from solar panels and offshore wind. With wind power not growing at the rate that planners want, biomass may be called on to do even more.

The dash for biomass, though, has many problems (see article). As with wind and solar power, investment in biomass does not happen without subsidy; current plans to convert half of Drax’s 4,000 megawatt capacity from coal to biomass depend on getting an extra £45 per megawatt hour from the government on top of what the electricity sells for. It also takes a lot of land to produce power with biomass. Generating 2,000MW of electricity from wood in a sustainable way requires a forest of some 6,600 square kilometres—which is more or less, as it happens, the area of the whole West Riding.
Unlike wind and solar generators, biomass burners must buy fuel. This is already putting pressure on prices for other wood users, such as builders, cabinet-makers and, we should admit, magazines that are still printed on paper. It also increases reliance on imports—one of the things that renewables are often claimed to reduce. Worse, biomass-burning is nothing like as good a climate hedge as people tend to think.

Biomass claims to be a “carbon neutral” way of generating power: although burning wood puts carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, growing replacement wood sucks that carbon dioxide back out. But the ideal of a biomass plantation that is harvested only at the rate at which it grows back is not always met. Even when it is, such plantations displace other ecosystems that would themselves have sucked down carbon. Processing and transporting the wood to the place where it is burned requires energy that may well come from non-renewable sources. According to the European Environment Agency, an EU body not involved in setting subsidies, some biomass programmes could end up emitting more carbon than the fossil fuels they are being subsidised to replace.

The wood for the trees

The underlying problem is the reverence accorded to renewable energy itself. Greens like it for various reasons: independence from fluctuating fuel prices, rural employment, sustainability, as well as low carbon emissions. But as the sorry state of biomass shows, not all renewable-energy technologies are good at achieving all those aims. Nor are all those aims worth spending scarce public money on. And those that are will often be amenable to more efficient support than is provided by broad, market-distorting subsidies.

Moving to an ever-lower-carbon economy at a deliberate pace is a good idea. The best way to do it is to set a carbon tax and let the market decide the cheapest, cleanest answer while researching future alternatives. Some renewable technologies would play a big role in that. But those who pursue renewable energy as an end in itself fail to see the wood for the trees.

From the print edition ''Korea Roulette'' The Economist 6th April 2013

Source:http://www.economist.com/news/leader...wables-bonfire